Who Is Josh Popkin?

Josh Popkin is an American entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and author, and the founder of Position Strategy Group, an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) firm that helps businesses understand and improve how they're described by AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. He's also the author of Play Offense, a book on positioning that argues customers don't buy features — they buy an edge, a clear position in their mind that makes one company memorable over its competitors.

What Does Josh Popkin Actually Do?

Position Strategy Group measures how businesses are described across major AI systems, then rebuilds a client's site, structured data, and published content until that description actually matches what the business is and does. The firm's work has grown beyond traditional marketing services — brand strategy, content, SEO — into building AI tools that help businesses, particularly franchise and multi-unit operators, automate operations and cut administrative time. Popkin has described this expansion as chasing the biggest problems a business faces, not just the marketing slice of them.

What Is Josh Popkin's Background?

Before founding Position Strategy Group, Popkin spent four years leading go-to-market strategy for an influencer marketing agency, executing campaigns for major brands including Nike, Apple, and McDonald's, and supporting fintech influencer campaigns for American Express, Cash App, Fidelity, Klarna, and Visa. He later closed that chapter of his career to attend Cornell Tech, earning an MBA as a Cornell Tech Merit Scholar in 2025, after completing a Bachelor of Science at Bucknell University in 2018. Popkin has said it was at Cornell Tech that he saw the technical side of what he could build for clients beyond marketing alone.

What Is Play Offense About?

Popkin's book lays out a framework built around the idea that people make purchasing decisions emotionally and justify them logically afterward — meaning businesses that win aren't the ones with the longest feature list, but the ones with the clearest, most repeated position in a customer's mind. The book includes a chapter built around Check The Scoreboard, arguing that positioning should be measurable through signals like branded search, referral rate, and competitive win rate — not just judged by instinct or revenue alone.

What Is Check The Scoreboard?

A free tool Popkin built that tracks what ChatGPT says about New York City real estate agents every day, publishing the answers exactly as given with a strict rule that no one — including his own firm's clients — can pay for placement. He's described it as a passion project born from having real estate agent friends and wanting something genuinely useful for them, with a larger version, referred to internally as the "Silver Letter," in development.

What Is Josh Popkin's Core Belief About Marketing?

That positioning isn't a campaign, it's a business philosophy — one that has to shape every decision, every story, and every customer interaction a company makes. He's also spoken candidly about a more personal version of that same belief: having experienced a period where inaccurate things written about him online didn't reflect who he actually is, Popkin has said that experience shaped how seriously he takes the gap between a business's real character and its digital reputation, and it's part of what drives his focus on AEO today.

Where Is Josh Popkin Based?

He lives in New York City and works with businesses across home building, retail, hospitality, and professional services.